The Russell Street Bombing (6 page)

In the end, police collected a veritable arsenal from the home of Peter Reed:
shotguns, pistols, ammunition, gun holsters, detonators, a hand grenade, and
gelignite. It all made the knuckle-duster Reed kept in a drawer by his bed seem
almost innocuous.

In one of the other bedrooms, crime scene examiners found a plethora of
automotive parts. There were even white and silver moulded panels - the silver
panels were similar to the Holden Commodore currently residing in the Stolen
Motor Vehicles compound. They also found scanners capable of monitoring police
radio frequencies. It appeared that Reed had been following police progress.

The day after the search and shooting, Wayne Ashley returned to the Kallista
house and supervised the removal of several cars parked at the rear of the
property. One, a Holden HQ sedan was taken to the Crime Scene section at
Macleod, while others were taken to the Stolen Motor Vehicles compound.

It was Ashley's job to make sure that all the collected evidence went to the
appropriate sections of the police and that all possible bomb-related evidence
went to Bob Barnes and the post-blast team from MRL. All firearms and associated
ammunition went to the Firearms division, and anything else of value was handed
over to Detective Chris O'Connor for the Taskforce.

Back at the Taskforce office, members not present at the Kallista raid were
shocked at the Wylie shooting. Another of their officers downed. Luckily, the
prognosis was for a good recovery, but nonetheless, it was another reminder that
police were dealing with people who were prepared to shoot it out with them.

Until Peter Reed fired on police, he had been viewed mainly as a petty car
thief. His actions at Kallista put him in a whole different category. Why would
a petty car thief shoot it out with police? Had he supplied the bomb car? And
did the fact that Reed was seen driving the red Daimler with the Brock Commodore
numberplates in its boot, connect him to the bank robbery in Donvale? Or was
shooting at police the actions a more heavily involved man?

The fingerprint search hit pay-dirt. Found on the newspaper that had been
wrapped around the gelignite, were fingerprints belonging to one Rodney Joseph
Minogue. Prints lifted from the toilet door of Reed's house belonged to Rodney
Minogue's brother, Craig 'Fatty' Minogue.

Simultaneous raids had been carried out on the same day as the
raid at Reed's house. Surveillance teams had identified people who he had spent
time while the police were tailing him. They too were raided. Reed's brother,
Steven Komiazyk lived in Olive Grove in Boronia. While his brother's house was
being raided and his brother was shooting and being shot by police, Komiazyk's
raid went more smoothly.

Among other items collected by police were a PVC chamois, two tracksuit tops,
a red-handled screwdriver, a Stanley screwdriver set and a tow rope. These were
identified by the owner of the bomb car as being in his car when it was stolen.
Searchers also found a drill-bit with paint fragments identical to the bomb car
and a rivet which investigators believed came from the removal of the
identification plates on the bomb car. Like his brother, Steven Komiazyk had his
own guns. Their serial numbers had been drilled out too.

Another address raided was one that Peter Reed had visited a number of times
in the surveillance period. The house in Haros Avenue, Nunawading belonged to a
friend of Reed's called Karl Zelinka who lived there with his girlfriend, Karen.

Karl Zelinka was taken in for questioning by members of the Taskforce and he
denied knowing Peter Reed. The investigators knew this wasn't true because Reed
had been seen visiting the Haros Avenue home a number of times. They wondered
what Zelinka had to hide. He was a cleanskin with no prior convictions, and it
was obvious that his connection in the bombing investigation did not sit easily
with him. The only items found in the initial sweep of his house were cigarettes
and confectionery consistent with that taken in the Braeside milkbar robbery.
Zelinka also had a sawn-off shotgun.

At each of the raids, police checked fences and fence posts for a match to
the block of wood that the bomb clock had been nailed to. They didn't find
anything.

Still in hospital for his injuries, Carl Donadio wanted to
prove wrong the doctors who said that his recovery could take six months. Three
weeks after the bombing, he had started physio. On the first day of his
rehabilitation, the physiotherapist came into his room, pulled him out of bed
and got him to walk three or four steps. Then she put him back to bed. The
minute she left the room, Donadio begged his watching family to help him out of
bed again. Behind the physio's back, he repeated the exercise and walked five
steps. He did this every day until his muscle conditioning slowly started to
return.

By this stage, boredom was a major contributing factor to Donadio's cabin
fever. Not only did he hate the hospital food, he hated the daily soap operas
which were the only thing on TV, and most of all he hated hospital full stop.

Much to the surprise of his doctors, Donadio recovered enough to return to
light duties five weeks after the bombing. He wasn't able to put his uniform on
because rather than a skin graft, doctors had decided to repair the gaping wound
in his leg by inserting a surgical balloon under his skin and inflating it daily
so that the skin stretched out around it. When there was enough skin, it would
be used to close the wound in his thigh once and for all. Until this procedure,
surgeons had to leave the wound open. It wasn't a pretty sight for visitors and
some of his more squeamish squad mates had fainted during their visits.

So Donadio started working at the Carlton North District office, happy for at
least his mind to be active, even if his body wasn't quite there yet. Loose
casual pants hid the balloon in his leg.

On 3 May, Peter Reed had recovered sufficiently from his
gunshot wound. He was brought in for questioning, dragged by detectives from
Russell Street police headquarters to the Magistrates' Court, doubled over,
screaming his innocence in a high-pitched voice. The media filmed his
performance.

Reed denied all involvement in the bombing, and he was charged, for the time
being with the attempted murder of Mark Wylie and remanded into custody. In the
meantime, taskforce detectives were investigating the link between Reed and the
Minogue brothers whose fingerprints had been found at his house. It turned out
that Peter Reed and Rodney Minogue had served time in prison together. Craig and
Rodney were small time crooks. The question was, were they involved in the
bombing. Craig's fingerprint on the toilet door may have been coincidence, but
it would be more difficult for his younger brother to explain how his
fingerprints came to be on newspaper wrapped around gelignite which was from the
same batch used in the bombing. More damning was the fact that the newspaper,
the
Border Morning Mail
, with Rodney Minogue's fingerprints on it, was
also the same newspaper dated the same day that the surviving bomb gelignite was
wrapped in. And the fact that the brothers had left town right after the
bombing, didn't make them look like they were men with nothing to hide.

In Craig Minogue's file, there was a notation about a car that had picked him
up after a court appearance. The car belonged to Karl Zelinka. The connections
were forming, but not only did Zelinka deny knowing Reed, he also denied knowing
the Minogue brothers. Taskforce investigators canvassed Zelinka's neighbours in
Haros Avenue. Several of them identified pictures of the Minogue brothers and
Peter Reed as being regular visitors to the house. Detectives wondered again why
Zelinka was lying to them.

While the investigators hunted for the bombers, the crime scene examiners
worked tirelessly to form connections with the evidence they had gathered. Wayne
Ashley says that detectives are good at reading people and forensic examiners
are good at reading evidence. It is the two sides of this investigative coin
that get the results in the end.

As Forensics staff processed the evidence from the Reed search, they began to
see connections between Reed and the bombing. The khaki canvas bag containing
the detonators confiscated from Reed's lounge room had identical buckles to that
found at the bomb scene which meant that a similar bag could have been used in
the bomb car. Wires on the detonators found at Reed's house had been cut with
the same instrument that had been used to cut the bomb detonators. If the
cutting instrument could be found with one of the suspects, that would further
link them to the crime. Both the gelignite and detonators were the same as those
found unexploded at the bomb site. Plastic bread crates identified as being
stolen from a Braeside milkbar were found at Reed's house. These were identical
to the ones that the bomb had been packed in. The silver Commodore accessories
found in the spare room were identified by the owner as coming from the stolen
Brock Commodore.

Bob Barnes made another break-through. One night as he lay in bed, he had a
Eureka moment when he realised that the strip of metal connecting the clock to
the block of wood making up the circuit, was in fact the handle from a metal
rubbish bin. The following day, he told the Taskforce detectives to be on the
look-out for a metal rubbish bin that was missing a lid or a handle.

In light of Karl Zelinka's denials about knowing Reed and the
Minogues, detectives from the Taskforce decided to go back to his house for
another look on 14 May. The Minogue brothers had still not been located, and
none of the other key players were talking.

Firstly, Zelinka's metal rubbish bin was found to have no lid. Secondly, one
of the handles on the bin itself, looked like someone had made an attempt to cut
it off. Could someone have tried to cut this handle off, and then settled for
the handle on the missing lid? Zelinka was vague about the whereabouts of his
bin lid.

And then came the discovery that many of the Taskforce investigators still
consider their finest investigative moment. In the course of each of the raids,
all fences had been checked to see if they were missing the block of wood that
the bomb clock had been mounted on. There were no obvious anomalies in Zelinka's
fence, but on this second examination, bomb expert Bob Barnes had an idea. He
climbed up on the fence and jumped over into the next door neighbour's yard.
Detective Bernie Rankin remembers hearing Barnes chuckling. Behind a large
camellia tree was a sawn-off fence post on the neighbour's side of the fence.
Holding the bomb block of wood in his hands, Barnes placed it on top of the
fence post. Even to the untrained eye, there was no doubt they were a perfect
match - faults that ran through the bomb block continued through the fence post.

And from that moment on, detectives from the Taskforce regarded the house in
Haros Avenue as being the bomb headquarters. All evidence pointed to the bomb
being assembled at Karl Zelinka's house, which put the heat on the hapless young
man. Up until the match with the fence post, Zelinka had been unwilling to
cooperate with police. Now, with evidence to connect his house with the bombing,
he quickly changed his mind.

Bernie Rankin took Karl Zelinka back to the office for a serious chat. He
laid out all the information that detectives had so far - how he'd lied about
knowing the Minogues and Peter Reed, his missing rubbish bin lid, and the bomb
block of wood matching his fence post.

'Imagine you were in our shoes,' said Rankin, 'How do you think it
looks?'

Zelinka knew the game was up. He asked for police protection for his
girlfriend Karen, and his family and agreed to tell police everything he knew.
Interviews took place over the next couple of days.

According to Zelinka, Craig and Rodney Minogue had lived with him at Haros
Avenue and Peter Reed would often visit the house. Two days before the bombing,
Zelinka had seen the two-toned Commodore later used at the bomb car being driven
into the garage. He had also seen the stolen Brock Commodore at his house.
Earlier, he had seen a case of explosives in the garaged and when he asked about
them, Craig Minogue told him to forget he's seen them.

Zelinka admitted to committing a burglary with Craig Minogue and Peter Reed
on the milkbar in Braeside. It was during this burglary that the milk crates had
been stolen. He also said that Craig had a bull terrier puppy who slept on a
blanket similar to the blanket found it the bomb car.

As well as Reed, the Minogues had another regular visitor, an older man they
referred to as 'Stan the Man'. Zelinka didn't know his full name.

Craig Minogue had bought Karl and Karen tickets to Sydney for Easter. They
had left on Wednesday, the day before the bombing, and when they returned, the
Minogue brothers were moving out of the Haros Avenue house. It was at this
point, Zelinka was told to get rid of his rubbish bin lid. He tossed onto a pile
of rubbish that was bound for the tip.

Using police intelligence sources, and checking known aliases against the
description Zelinka gave of Stan the Man, Taskforce detectives soon identified
him as 50-year-old Stanley Brian Taylor. Taylor's prior convictions dated back
to 1949. He had first been arrested and charged with stealing fish when he was
just 12-years-old. Stan Taylor did time in Pentridge Prison's notorious
H-Division and was dubbed 'Wild Man' for his part in the 1972 prison riots. He
was paroled in 1978 and by 1979 he had been given a job with the Youth Council
of Victoria working with troubled teens. He had even played bit-parts in a
couple of long-running Australian television series including
Cop Shop
and
Prisoner
.

So the big question for the Taskforce was: why had Stanley Brian Taylor
visited the bomb house? Was he trying to talk the bombers out of their task, or
was he involved?